How To Install & Configure W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin

Page speed is important for a better user experience and also for SEO. In WordPress, there are many cache plugins available. But out of all of them, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache (W3TC) are my favorite. The major difference between these two plugin is: Super cache is easy to configure where as W3TC has too many options & you need to configure extensively.

I have heard a lot of good things about the W3 Total Cache plugin. It’s a lot like WP Super Cache, but with more options. In particular, if you are planning on using a CDN, the W3 Total Cache plugin is really great.

To speed up loading time, I’m using MaxCDN on my blog network. To supplement this, I also tested out the W3 Total Cache plugin.

Note: Make sure to uninstall the WP Super Cache plugin or any other WordPress cache plugin.

How To Configure W3 Total Cache

The setup options in W3 Total Cache are much more advanced than those in WP Super Cache. But don’t get confused! I’ll show you how I’ve set it up on my blog, and you can review and copy the settings for your own site.

General

Once you have installed and activated W3 Total Cache, go to Performance > General and enable everything you want to cache. Later on, you can make changes to individual settings and fine tune your W3TC configuration.

When you are done, click on “Save all settings”.

After making changes, click on “Preview” to check if everything is OK. If everything looks good, click on “Deploy” to make these settings live.

Refer to the image:

Page Cache

By default, all of the essential settings are checked. Review them, and move on to the next setting.

Minify

All of the settings in “Minify” are also plug and play.

But if you are not using a CDN, you might want to disable “Automatically upload modified files”.

Many options in this plugin are plug and play. If you follow this tutorial, you should have no problems setting it up.

Using a cache plugin in addition to a CDN will help dramatically decrease the load time of your website. And a faster site means a better ranking and a better user experience. If you aren’t caching and using a CDN, you need to start doing that today.

Do let us know: Which caching plugin are you using? Share your experience in the comments below!

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A blog scientist by the mind and a passionate blogger by heart ❤️. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud (Award winning blog), speaker at various international forums.
Life motto: Live while you can! Teach & inspire while you could & Smile while you have the teeth.

Eddie I’m still playing with W3 total cache on one of my site..
The thing is 6-8 months back when I got to know abt W3 total cache, they had lots of issues..But now they have added lots of feature.. In short they have combined 3-4 WordPress optimization plugins into one.. So I’m kinda loving the features but only thing which I need to make sure is all settings are perfect… !!
Which version you are using?

Good information Harsh. I’m using this on my blog and it works great.
It depends on the hosting server also. Wp-Super cache did not do anything for me, W3 did the trick. I can see the improvement in yslow,Google page speed test and some online tools after enable W3.

You could find some useful settings under ‘Browser Cache’ settings to speed up more.

Yes, as Eddie said, you cant see the real changes on your blog (stylesheet or sidebar, headers..etc) when W3 enabled. You must clear the cache or disable the plugin until complete modifying theme.

I agree with you on that Dinesh. Though many people make mistake by installing W3 total cache along with super cache, which created lots of issues like 404 not found and all….
I have completely uninstalled Super cache and installed W3 total cache and my site is loading faster now….

hrash, previously i had installed wp super cache and removed that plugin but i am still seeing the supercache folder in cpanel which had some posts linked in it. i tried to delete that but i could not delete it.

Sathish Super cache is great and I have nothing against it.. I wanted to configure CDN and for that reason I moved one of my blog to W3 total cache and after looking at response..I will see if I will be moving ShoutMeLoud to W3 total cache + CDN or not…

I would give a +1 for posting this post. W3 Total Cache is a must use plugin. Its similar to Super cache, but as Harsh said its a combination of 3-4 plugins including gzip,minify,etc. So if you configure it smartly then you can decrease your load time to a gr8 extent.

Hey CrunchyNow
I just had a word with Hostgator live tech support and I asked the question:
Which Cache plugin do you recommend Wp Super cache or W3 Total cache and they answered me W3 total cache is much better… I believe this answer will help you..

I faced some problems with my site before I had caching plugin and my site is hosted on Hostgator. It was somehow sucking up huge server resources and Hostgator decided to take down my website altogether.

They mailed me of course and recommended I use this W3 caching plugin. When hostgator has recommended it, there’s no further questioning to do. I installed it immediately. A little tweaking here and there and my site was good to go again.

Thanks Harsh for this tutorial. Though I have already installed it myself, a non-technical person like me can never understand the options provided and what they are supposed to do. So we never know whether to enable it or disable it.

With tutorials like these, we can go back to what we do best and that’s promoting our business…

I tried it on one of my blogs, last year. It had some neat features (looks like a few more, now!) and I kind of liked it, but a few things actually slowed my load times down (like compression). If you are thinking about using a CDN, though, it definitely makes a lot of sense.

Great plugin! But, when I use minifying option, there is some error occurs and all my css and js files are gone, if i try to open them, only one string “bad file param”. Does anyone has the same problem? Could someone figure it out?

Hi Harsh,
I wish you write a new post for updated W3 Total Cache plugin with the CDN options and place a link to that post here because there are some changes in the plugin options. Moreover, CDN plays a vital role in optimizing a site’s speed.

Hey ! I need some help i have installed this plugin on my blog but after the installation my site doesnot open a blank page is shown, what to do now? admin page is not opening too. waiting for your reply…

hi Harsh , After installing this plugin , my adsense impression gone down where no change in traffic ( analytics ) , like i am getting 15k visitor per day but impression in adsense is about 9 k .Any idea why ??

None of the above-the-fold content on your page could be rendered without waiting for the following resources to load. Try to defer or asynchronously load blocking resources, or inline the critical portions of those resources directly in the HTML.

Remove render-blocking JavaScript:

Optimize CSS Delivery of the following:”

AND

Leverage browser caching
Setting an expiry date or a maximum age in the HTTP headers for static resources instructs the browser to load previously downloaded resources from local disk rather than over the network.

While w3tc is very good and does a good job in getting a better pagespeed score, you need to complement the plugin with minit plugin (github) and wp-smushit (for image optimization).
After having installed minit plugin , my

@Tom
Thanks for your suggestion on Minit plugin and I have to try it. For image optimisation, I’m already using Smush.it plugin, but I also ensure to compress images before uploading using imageoptim app (Free) on my mac.

Thanks a lot for a very useful post! I have been using W3 Total Cache and love the results. It has a great effect to speed up my website and I cannot imagine not having a caching plugin. I really like how you went through the settings in your post. I think that the vast number of settings in the plugin can be overwhelming and to know which one to switch on or off can be a challenge. I have minify turned off too as you suggest because it was causing problems with my blog’s CSS.

I do have the database cache turned on and I use Cloudflare as a CDN. I will have to experiment by turning the database cache off and seeing if it further speeds up my site. Do you see a decrease in speed if this is turned on with a CDN?

Hi harsh thanx a lot for this tutorial ….. Actually before a month I used this plugin but uninstalled it and moved to w3 super cache … But I guess some files left over my database and ftp and now before a week I deleted w3 super cache and again back to w3 total cache …. My database and ftp is now look a trash box with many unwanted queries and files …. Anything I can do to rectify everything and keep my database and ftp clean ? 🙂

Can anyone increase information on stopping /de-activating the plugin while touching code or similar activities. Will it.damage.much the performance or rankings on google?

And how do you clean cache for that matter?

Im installing W3 Total cache today on my blog http://teotrainer.com and the following week will hire CDN service MaxCDN for 9 bucks a month. Great deal!
That plan services 2 blogs and includes better performance for standard and mobile/responsive sites.

Are you still actively working with http://wphostingdiscount.com/ ? I just ran a mobile friendly & speed est on the site using the new Google Mobile test at https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/. The results are: Mobile Friendliness = 99/100 (good), Mobile Speed = 65/100 (poor), and Desktop Speed = 78/100 (fair). The mobile and desktop speeds require some help. Any insights would be helpful, since I find the W3 cache is not making an impact.

@Scott
Yes, I’m working on WPhostingDiscount & you are right about the mobile performance. That’s coz of my custom coded mobile theme. I’m working on mobile speed & hopefully it would be better in coming days.

Thanks for the great write up. Yes W3 total cache is a great plugin however it is a bit confusing for most to configure. You do a good job explaining how to do that here, and it does work well with maxCDN. Most of my clients tend to be on shared hosting so I recommend adding this plugin which greatly improves site speed and user experience. Thanks again!

Nice sharing. W3 total cache is an excellent WordPress plugin. Most of the WordPress users use this cache plugin. I have some confusion about this plugin but after reading your article, I am clear about this plugin. Now I know how to settings this plugin in my WordPress site. Thank you very much for sharing such a details article.

Hi Harsh,
On first instance everything worked for me.
Later when I installed Yoast SEO everything crashed! I then removed Yoast SEO reinstalled W3 Total Cache but all in vain.
I don’t know which plugin should be the next to try for caching.
Thanks.

Excellent Harsh. I really follow your tips. I had bought a book from you is about Affiliate Marketing. The book is good writing but I didn’t understand much more in that. Can you simplify it for better understanding?

Hello Harsh! I am following your blog since long now and trust have learnt a lot. Thanks.

I need a little bit of help – Mine is a startup site, but have started with Cloud VPS Server with Data Centre located in Mumbai, India. 2.80*4 CPU and 8GB Ram is the part of Server Configuration. For better Site Security and Performance what should i use – Cloudflare (If cloudflare then free or paid plan) or Sucuri, W3Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Varnish Cache or Some other plugin/software.

@Amit
If you need top notch security then use Sucuri
If average security (Still great) is ok, then use Cloudflare + any cache plugin.
Varnish is server level cache & if you can configure it (Take care of cache flushing)..

Nice blog, I have a query regarding object cache. If you enable them I have seen it slows down the admin panel of WordPress drastically. Don’t you think that option needs to be configured on a situation basis?